If it doesn't make money they won't tell you the truth.
First, let me show you the quotes this High Times article has to entice people to read it:
Okay, the article is titled Reform or Bust, John Taylor Gatto's War on Schooling. By Annie Nocenti. On page 38.
"What would compel a three-time Teacher of the Year winner, education
author and scholar, and 30-year veteran teacher to make such a statement? What
kind of wall is this man up against? John Taylor Gatto is a self-styled saboteur
at the forefront of a quiet little revolution of radical school reform. His call
to arms requires teachers, parents, and students to unite in guerilla warfare in
the classroom.
"Just because your kids are being schooled doesn't mean they're being
educated. Schooling is given or imposed," explains Gatto, "but an education is
taken by the student. The kid is 90 percent sovereign in it. A kid should be the
director of his life." When Gatto won the New York State Teacher of the Year
award in 1991, his infamous response to the honor was to quit. He didn't want to
"hurt kids" anymore. In an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal he wrote,
"I've come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: a curriculum of
confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect
for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit
into a world I don't want to live in."
In Gatto's acceptance speech for that same award, he articulated some key
problems: that teachers essentially teach confusion(they teach things out of
context), indifference(the bell rings; drop what you're doing and move on), and
emotional dependency(reinforced with gold stars, smiles, frowns, tests and
grades). Students may like or hate school in equal number, but Gatto believes
that what is learned in public school is not worth the ways in which the process
can cripple a child.
Does such a crisis warrant pulling your child out of the system?
"There's genius in every child," Gatto declares, "but it hardly ever
regrows once it's stomped out. Schools turn out incomplete people, people that
have to be connected to some other source of meaning because they can't generate
meaning from the inside. Schooling as it exists isn't nearly the most efficient
way if you want mental development, and it's a catastrophe if you want moral
development."
An informal questioning of adults as to what they though of school elicits
some telling responses. Ann Loeding is typical. Loeding, now a tugboat captain
on the Hudson River, recalls how in her physics class she "didn't see the point
of the theories - I couldn't see how they applied to my life. If you don't care
about something, you won't learn it." But as an adult, it is those very same
concepts - fluid dynamics, gravity, angles, displacement - that Loeding needs to
dock her boat and navigate rivers. "I have to be able to predict how physical
matter is going to behave in certain circumstances, like when I ballast a barge.
I wish that teacher had found a way to show us how what we were studying in wave
tanks applied to something real, so that shift from the intellectual world to
the physical world would make sense and come alive." This is what Gatto means
when he talks of a curriculum of confusion and indifference: things taught out
of context and disassociated from life. This is why the central tenet of his
reform is a call to simply get kids out of school.
I first encountered Gatto's outlaw methods 12 years ago, while putting
myself through Columbia graduate school working as a comic book writer. Two
13-year-olds, Jamal and Victor, tracked me down in a pizza joint with a slice as
an offering and asked, would I teach them how to make comic books? Sure, I said.
But why weren't they in school? "Oh well, Mr. Gatto lets us out if we find
someone to mentor us." And so we began to meet on the Columbia campus lawn
between my classes, where I taught them visual storytelling. One day, Roland
Legiardi-Laura, who was in Gatto's eight grade class in 1996, showed up with a
camera and shot my lawn class for a film he was making about Gatto.
Who was this Gatto, this teacher who would allow his students to cut class
and hang out with a comic book writer? Who was this Gatto, that his students
stayed obsessed with him 25 years later?
Fast-forward to 2003: Legiardi-Laura and Gatto are together again, this
time on a common mission: to produce a megamovie about education that they hope
will provoke radical reform. The proposed film, The Fourth Purpose, asks
the questions: What's wrong with schooling? How did it get that way? What can we
do about it? What the film calls the "fourth purpose" of education is the idea
that schools were intended to serve the economic state.
"How can the richest, most powerful country on the planet have a school
system that is so potentially detrimental to our children?" asks Legiardi-Laura.
"The American approach to education is full of anomalies - horrible diet, too
many prescribed drugs, corporate penetration, of the so-called sacred learning
environment. Kids are looked at as corporate targets. They're being taught math
with Hershey's Kisses and M&M's. It's in the textbooks. While there was
absolutely no conspiracy to do this, there is a completely uninhibited sense of
the mission of school as having virtually nothing to do with education and a
tremendous amount to do with the management of populations."
As Gatto puts it, "the mass of kids learn, quite deliberately, to be bored.
There's a reason for that. The truth is that bored people detach from their
minds and connect with their appetites. They're desperately searching for
something to put in their mouths, or to kiss, or to throw rocks at, or to kill.
Bored people aren't serious competition. They don't gather together and form
organizations to overthrow leadership. They're seeking some kind of solace and
relief from their boredom, so they become the most dependable customers of all."
Is the school system, then, designed to produce formulaic, obedient,
predictable, dumbed-down, conformist consumers and workers, and, more
nefariously, to discourage dissent? If this all sounds conspiratorial, turn to
history. Here's a sample of what was being written about education a hundred
years ago:
"The raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry." - ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY, dean of the School of Education, Stanford University, 1905
"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." - WOODROW WILSON, from an address to the New York City High School Teachers Association, January 9, 1909
"Somewhere between the ages of 11 and 15, the average child begins to suffer from an atrophy, the paralysis of curiosity and the suspension of the power to observe. The trouble I should judge to lie with the schools." - THOMAS EDISON
At a recent fund-raiser for the Fourth Purpose, Gatto said in his
opening remarks, "What we are after in this film is the destruction of the
pernicious school myth that has paralyzed social justice in the US for a
century. Schooling as we know it is a powerful expression of the sickness of
this society, not a cure for the sickness. What justice cries out for to break
this logjam is shock treatment. Only a shocking bill of changes will wake the
public up."
Are things really that dire? If schooling really is in a state of crisis,
shouldn't the system welcome that overhaul? Or is there something endemic in the
system that resists this kind of change? "John believes that the school is not a
repairable engine," says Legiardi-Laura, "because it's doing what it's supposed
to do. It is an engine of restraint and restriction and management. No one wants
to fix it, because they don't believe it's broken. John often says, "Genius is
as common as dirt." If you were to release all the genius that is pent up in a
human being, you'd have a hard time maintaining the current economic system.
This terrifies people. So no, they don't want to 'fix' schools."
When asked if the current school system is so damaging to children that
we'd be better off with anything else, Gatto replies, "Yes. Absolutely. With
anything else. Or nothing."
What Gatto proposes, in order to wake up the system, is a kind of guerrilla
warfare within the system, a covert revolt of private contracts and quietly
disruptive acts to be committed by students, teachers and parents. In Gatto's
final years of teaching, he had one rule: to commit an act of sabotage a day.
"What kept him going in the end," says Legiardi-Laura, "was his anger. Every day
he'd throw a wrench in the works: switch teachers' time cards, or ring the
fire-alarm just to get the kids out of class." Gatto is reluctant, for obvious
reasons, to go into detail about these antics. And while Gatto, a decorated
teacher at the end of his teaching career, was able to risk acts of revolt that
bent the law, there are a variety of other methods.
Consider standardized testing. From school principals to parents and
student, the most common complaint I heard about the education system was
regarding the emphasis on tests, like the Regents exam and SAT's, which some
believe only serve to reinforce the class system. Curriculums are routinely
shoved aside to focus on training students in rote memorization, how to take and
do well on tests. One assistant principal in New York City, who would only speak
anonymously, told me, "It's all data-driven. [Mayor] Bloomberg brought in MBA's
to 'fix' schools. They don't give a damn about the individual. You have to pass
these tests or you don't get your diploma. It's corporate mentality. Why can't I
speak to you on the record? Because there is no debate anymore. They don't allow
it.'
What does Gatto propose doing? At the fund-raising speech mentioned
earlier, he offered this tactic: "It only takes a few determined people to
temporarily grind these engines to a halt, sending reverberations of dissonance
into every level of the system. Think only of the multibillion-dollar
standardized testing aspect of the thing: With relatively little investment of
time or money, a well-orchestrated campaign to sabotage these instruments could
be launched and prosecuted over the Internet. You need only think of the mass of
teenagers who brought the war in Vietnam to a premature conclusion to see that
an essential linchpin of the fourth-purpose system - testing - could quickly be
destroyed."
What turns a devoted teacher into a saboteur? Gatto began his career with
high ideals, teaching a rigorous academic curriculum. As Legiardi-Laura recalls,
"We did a detailed analysis of Moby Dick, had a chess club, and watched
films like Night and Fog. And this was eight grade! I was only 13!"
In his second decade of teaching, Gatto realized he could be a more
effective teacher if he simply got the students out of school. "He created a
minifiefdom he called the lab school," says Legiardi-Laura. Gatto began finding
ways to derail the process from within, ways to break rules. His students
started neighborhood newspapers, student employment agencies, did community
service, found mentors, did field research, studied businesses, started a public
garden - whatever they wanted to try. Gatto was game. "The road to
self-development is raw experience," says Gatto. "Anything that gets the child
out of the classroom, involved in the community, but most important,
self-directed." Gatto began to realize that being confined in the building
was the problem. "I spent 30 years of my life as a teacher and another 18
years as a student, so I'd virtually spent my entire life locked up. I began to
wonder, why were we doing it this way?"
Good question. Just why is it that we warehouse our children in
cell-block-style classrooms five days a week for 12 years, force-feed them a
standardized diet of what we think they need to learn, and move it all along
with boredom, bells, and tests? Who came up with this system of
forced-confinement learning? Has it just devolved into easy daycare? Sure, kids
learn things in school, get to socialize, get a needed break from their parents.
But much of a child's time in school is squandered, and worse, the process
itself has some ill effects. Is school a waste, or even a theft, of childhood?
What are the real skills that actually get us through life? Self-assurance,
independent thought, autonomy, a passion for learning - are these things taught
or stifled in school? The fact that we tell students what they need to learn
rather than allow them to help direct their own study - does this derail a
child's natural ability to think for himself, one of the main skills necessary
for survival?
When it comes to asking and answering those questions, Gatto is an
irrepressible firebrand. His usual outfit is khaki pants and a pocketed vest. He
strides into a room with the physical presence of an ex-wrestler or ex-football
pro, as if ready for combat, an impression offset by an angelic face ringed by a
halo of white curls. He arrives for our interview several hours late and
declares that he'll be more relaxed if he does one thing. He grabs the phone,
dials a bookie in Costa Rica, asks for "No Dog," puts a bet on the Pittsburgh
Steelers, hangs up and says, "Okay. Now I'm ready," then launches into a story
about why he was late. He describes how he was driving down from his farm in
Ithaca and got caught in a drug sweep in Ellenville, then offers this tidbit: "I
never worked in a school where one of the teachers wasn't a minor-league drug
dealer, and any stranger walking in could find out who it was and make a buy. I
must have worked at 30 schools as a per-diem teacher, and there was always a
teacher that was a drug dealer. Always. Every school I was ever in."
Nothing Gatto does is traditional. He began his career as an imposter with
a confidence game: He borrowed a license and began substitute teaching under
someone else's name. He quickly discovered that there was an assumption that
some kids were hopeless, an indoctrinated belief that they'd never excel, and
those kids were being denied an education. One of his first gigs as a sub was a
Spanish class. In less than an hour he taught the students how to tell time in
Spanish, only to incur the wrath of the administration: Telling time was
supposed to fill an entire month's curriculum! Now what were they going
to teach? This is the kind of inane thinking Gatto was up against.
By the third decade of his teaching career, "John realized just being in
the school building was a death sentence," says Legiardi-Laura. Gatto began to
break down the week as follows: a day each of field study, mentorship, community
service, and internship in a workplace, with just one day in the classroom.
Gatto's advice to teachers is: "You have to betray the system. To begin with, if
the system knew it they were being betrayed, the teacher's tenure would be
extremely short. So they have to operate as a saboteur in the system. They have
to appear to be the best and most obedient. You benefit from the school's
bewilderment and chaos. Anything that discomforts the system, the organization,
gives you breathing room to make private contracts with kids and with parents,
to let kids range through the outside community and identify resources."
Key to Gatto's reform is this notion of busting out of the prison-style
classroom. Where did our system of compulsory, factory-farm-style McSchooling
come from? "The Prussians," says Legiardi-Laura. "They were defeated by Napoleon
in 1806, so they redesigned their country to produce a better soldier. They were
the first modern country in the world to have a national compulsory education
system. That was around 1819. Before that, there were all kinds of eclectic
setups. In the 1840s there was an aggressive debate about public schools in this
country. Horace Mann was the most articulate advocate. He went to Prussia and
reported back on its system in glowing terms. He proposed the Prussian model of
an organized, efficient, compulsory school system, but instead of good soldiers,
it would produce good citizens. There was a lot of native resistance. But
America was becoming a truly industrial nation, and those fortunes - oil,
railroads - needed to protect their capital. The creation of large mass schools
was designed to mimic the shape, sound, and rhythms of factories. They were
called factory schools, but they turned out not widgets but children. The intent
was to process children and prepare them to accept a life as a working member of
the lower ranks of society.
Is there any hope of changing this grand experiment in social engineering?
If Gatto is right, if school is crippling your child's free will, shouldn't you
get him or her the hell out of there? But wait, you say. You can't abolish
school. I have a job, I have to stick my kid somewhere all day. What's a parent
to do? There are private schools, alternative schools, and a two-million-strong
home-schooling movement. But what can a parent who doesn't have the time, money,
or energy for any of this to do?
"That fact that the kid's body is trapped is almost irrelevant," says Gatto. "A parent can free the kid's mind. Get him out of school in his head. The
kid can enter the school as an anthropologist watching how other people are
being bent and mutilated but be trained to observe closely, analyze, and
evaluate. These are the marks of an educated mind, not getting into med
school. All the colleges in the country are open to you regardless of what your
school record is. Don't let them buffalo you. Get your name in the paper by
refusing to take standardized tests."
A provocative stance. What about repercussions? "Ignore liabilities," says Gatto. Sound dangerous? Maybe. But Gatto thinks these experiences help kids grow
up, something that takes too long as it is. "We've artificially extended
childhood. Admiral Farragut, at age 12, had a 60-hour work week. What he put
himself through, in terms of academic exercise, a Yale senior wouldn't be able
to do. The school system artificially extends childhood."
What about the essentials, like reading? "How to read is probably a 30-day
and not a 12-year undertaking. How actually to read. How to read between the
lines. How to mark up a book. I used to tell my students, 'If this book comes
back at the end of the year and it's fit for anyone else to read, you're
destroyed as far as I'm concerned. I want to see that you've argued with every
line in the damn book.' Bending your mind in a contest with the author produces
effects that are undreamed of when you're just reading for the main idea,
summarizing."
Gatto also takes what he can from elite private boarding schools where
children, although not immune to the crippling process of schooling, are getting
exceptional educations. "What these schools do is distill what can be conveyed
of value in an artificial confinement situation." Gatto taught his public school
students how to mimic the privileged. Simple things, explains Gatto, like
"repeated exercises in the forms of good manners. A modulated voice. Politeness,
respect and civility are the foundation of all transactions. You teach the codes
- and they're always superficial - by which insiders recognize each other. I had
13-year-old kids on a regular basis taking lecture classes at Columbia Law
School, and not with permission. No one could tell the difference. I teach a
complete theory of access to any institution, any person. Ghetto kids would say
to me, constantly, that there was no point in them going to Wall Street or the
Federal Reserve, because those world are shut to them. I thought that too for
most of my life, but nine times out of ten what you're dealing with is not
racial prejudice, it's class prejudice. It's some sign you're giving off -
you're not looking at the person, there are cues that you're not part of that
group. Study the culture of the organization you want access to. Just watch
them. How they dress, carry themselves, behave. A spiral notebook in your hand
says one thing, a clipboard another."
For those who are able to, Gatto recommends an alternative school or some
form of collective home-schooling. He offers the Amish as an example. "We raise
kids to have a good job. The Amish raise children to have an independent
livelihood so they can be sovereign. Even if the kid is born with one arm or
half a brain, there are no exceptions to raising every kid to have an
independent livelihood." Gatto deals with the objection that religion plays a
role by offering up a secular society, the Mondragon Cooperative in Basque,
Spain. "They more or less follow the same principles as the Amish but are
resolutely atheistic. Now those are two potent living examples."
There is a heady array of alternative school possibilities; indeed,
something of a "boutique" mentality now pervades the field. Chater, Magnet,
Essential, Multiple-Intelligence, Free, Progressive, Foxfire, Montessori, and
Waldorf schools; schools without walls, homes-schooling, second-chance, and even
something called "last-chance" schools - the choices are daunting. In general,
the characteristics they share in some combination are small classes, high
expectations, student-specific curricula, flexible schedules, community
involvement, active rather than passive learning, multiple ages, and limited or
no testing. Some of these alternatives fly below the radar of the state; others
are state-funded places to dump "difficult" kids.
The alternative to the nine-to-three bell-driven schooling can be as simple
as an enriched afternoon program. If you look at Christian home-schooling, it
looks traditional, yet the kids are with mom and dad," says Legiardi-Laura. At
the other end of the spectrum, loose-knit groups of home-schoolers can function
almost entirely outside of the classroom. Private alternative schools have to
make money, and some fear that the profit motive combined with a lack or
accountability will eventually turn them into something worse than public
schools.
How does one start an alternative school? I visited a brand new one, the
Community School of New Paltz, to find out. It was started by Sue Fisk and Paul
Tobin, after Tobin was inspired by a Waldorf school lecture. His son was
finishing eight grade, and Tobin was considering home-schooling. "I didn't like
the one-size-fits-all type of schooling," he says. Tobin and Fisk went shopping
for a curriculum and decided to use the Waldorf academic curriculum for history,
math, and science. "The idea behind Rudolf Steiner's Waldorf schools is a little
esoteric, but kids learn 'live' - learning isn't a dead thing. When they're
studying history, they study the turmoil and revolutions, then look to the self.
At 14, you have all those hormones raging; it's like having a revolution inside.
Academics are taught in the morning, and in the afternoon we bring in the
artisans. We're going to perform a play and do community service, so that when
they graduate, they'll feel they have a responsibility to the community. I want
them to know that their voice will matter." Once they settled on a curriculum,
Tobin and Fisk needed more students. "We did some open houses, advertised, used
word of mouth. We got seven kids." How about financing? "By the seat of our
pants. We charge tuition andget just enough for the teachers and to rent the
space. We're applying for tax-exempt status and education grants."
Tobin invited me to teach a class in journalism at this school, and as I
entered the classroom, another "civilian," who had just taught a civics class,
was leaving. She mentioned that the students were going to join a local
political campaign, and suggested I relate my journalism lesson to the use of
the press in politics. The students were eager and alert, despite the fact that
this was their last class of the day and a glorious sun beckoned outside. A few
had been home-schooled their whole lives; others had been only in public schools
or alternative schools, and a few had done all three. They are all preferred
alternative schooling. "Public school is way too crowded, there are no breaks,
you don't get any attention. If you have a question, you have to wait till the
end of the class to ask it, but then you'll be late for the next class." The
students said that home-schooling depended on the parents. "I traveled. I got to
see the world and learn about it," said one home-schooler. "I know home-school
kids that do nothing, but I also know one kid, his parents really push him hard.
Too hard." As another homeschooler put it, "I studied what I was interested in,
so I'll hold onto it longer. My friends in public school don't care about their
classes, so they're not learning anything."
Some home-schoolers are quite off the grid. Home-schooling seems to be a
fairly deregulated system, although many states are beginning to requite more
accountability. All a parent need do is turn in quarterly reports that consist
of hours spent learning and grades. "The state doesn't care," said one parent.
"They're so overburdened, they're happy it's one less student they have to deal
with." Statistically, home-schoolers test in the 80th percentile or better.
Home-schoolers often share parent-teachers, with the teaching spread among a
minicommunity team of rotated parents. One parent at the Community School of New
Paltz, a firefighter, was upset by the Patriot Act that was enacted shortly
after 9/11, how it broadened the power of law enforcement agencies and violated
fundamental rights. He was inspired to teach a class in rights: the Magna Carta,
the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. The class became so popular they were
turning students away.
At the extreme end of the movement is something called unschooling.
"Unschooling is the most far out kind of home-schooling," says Legiardi-Luara.
It's the fastest growing component of the movement. The child, from the earliest
age possible, is allowed to direct their own education." I spoke with one
"unschooler," and he described how he directed his own studies. For instance, he
saw a monarch butterfly, became interested in where it was from, its colors, and
how it migrated, which led to a study of Africa and its people and customs. He
articulated what he'd learned, and it encompassed history, culture and biology.
The learning appeared meandering but was self-directed, much like a butterfly's
flight.
One charge leveled at the home-schooling movement is that children miss out
on socialization. Socialization in school is horrendous," counters Legiardi-Laura. "When I went to school, you learned institutional racism. There
was unofficial racial tracking. There were 'special project' kids - always
white. I was socialized to be a good consumer, follow someone else's
instructions, taught age segregation, all in the personal environment of the
demeaning cliques. Look at Columbine!"
What about the quality of education received through home-schooling? "Look
at the Colfax family in California," says Legiardi-Laura. "They were
home-schooled. They lived on a hardscrabble homestead, earned money raising
goats. All four sons were offered full scholarships to Harvard; three said yes.
Kids rise to challenges. Look at Tanya Aebi. She was a troubled girl, a bike
messenger hanging out in the East Village, when her father challenged her, said
she could have a college education or a 26-foot slope, but if she took the boat
she'd have to sail around the world alone and grow up. She took the challenge
and became the youngest person ever to circumnavigate the globe alone. There's a
book, Maiden Voyage, all about her. It's extraordinary what kids are
capable of when challenged. Look at the Williams sisters. Piss poor, from
Compton, LA. Their dad watched a tennis match on TV, was shocked at the
hundred-thousand-dollar prize money, and thought, I can teach my girls this. He
was a postal worker. He got them to carry the telephone books to get strong, he
took them to crappy asphalt courts to practice. Look where they are now. That's
home-schooling."
All this requires time and energy, something that the parents of children
in the worst crisis in public schools don't necessarily have. I spent a year
teaching in the Bronx for LEAP(Learning through and Extended Arts Program), an
organization that sends artists into the public school systems to make up for
the lack of an arts curriculum. I remember my shock at the kids lined up to take
their Ritalin, at the lack of essentials like paper, (I was told the paper
shipment "didn't make it" that year), at the 30-plus students per class, at
teenagers with a lack of basic reading and writing skills. Surmounting these
things was exhausting, but what kept me going was the enormous untapped talent
of the students. They had behavioral problems but no lack of talent. And in the
teacher's lunchroom between classes, I encountered passionate, engaged,
far-from-jaded teachers. If the problem is not with the teachers nor with the
students, it has to be with the system.
Cinema is rich in examples of both students in revolt against the system
and heroic teachers struggling to make a difference. These days one finds Gatto
and Legiardi-Laura hard at work on their film. "Film is the quintessential
American medium," says Legiardi-Laura. "Film can generate a debate. The only way
to affect education, which is the preamble to any meaningful change in American
political life, is by challenging the education system that is its bedrock. That
system has to change."
Gatto spends his time lecturing on his theories, inspiring an army of
defectors, viral elements in the system. His radical, questioning-what-is spirit
is essentially toxic to the system. He's an antibody within the school system,
spreading a virus of new thought, one person at a time.
"What one single skill of all the millions available pays off best in
American society? It's the ability to speak in a compelling fashion to any
person you run into. How much energy do schools expend in allowing practice in
that? Zero. If I were to found a school that would revolutionize schooling,"
says Gatto, "I'd concentrate on two things: public speaking and civility.
Someone who is well spoken and graceful in their interactions is always taken
care of. When you float through Harlem and touch the people who have risen out
of the ghetto, they're people like Jesse Jackson. And those two things are very
teachable, very learnable, by everybody. So the horseshit about bell curves and
different styles of learning? Sweep the board clean of those. Give people those
two gifts." HT
Info about John Taylor Gatto, his books, Roland LEgiardi-Laura, and The Fourth Purpose can be found at johntaylorgatto.com
I just want to get some more stuff before I give the magazine back.
There's this quote from an article on Mark Webber that I like. It's, "I am a revolutionary, and I'm linked up with a movement, and I have a duty to let people know there is a movement in this country." I second that.
Here's another one from page 54, "It's good for your soul to take care of people. And it's time for people to stop thinking about just their families, and start thinking of others."